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One Video Card, 12 Monitors
Jamie found a story that might make your jaw drop if you happen to have some need to put 12 video cards in your machine. Although if that isn't enough, you can always install two of these. I don't think I'm kidding.
I know that motherboards only support two but I seem to recall a story of someone who might be interested in that.
Also, in the article, they call this behemoth "Powercolor innovation." I'd rather we called it "Powercolor scaling" unless they actually tackled the problem in some way other than slapping to cards together into one.
My work here is dung.
I always assumed it was for performance reasons. Though 12 seems a bit ridiculous (and awesome), I've always wanted to put four together with a little more convenience.
I think a 4 or 6 core CPU could support 12 users in many cases. I could see building a computer lab at a school this way to minimize administrative burden. But it's too bad multi-seat linux doesn't work better. I have struggled with it on and off over the years, and it just doesn't seem to have critical mass of interest to gain real distro support.
Once you go past a three screen Eyefinity setup, Bezels become a real serious problem. With three displays it's no big deal, since the center monitor serves as your primary view while the other two monitors expand your peripheral vision...but with 6 monitors, you will have bezels crossing the center of your point of view, making things real wonky.
Yes, it's awesome having the size, but until someone releases a bezel-less six monitor system, it's kind of a waste of time. Besides, with how much a six monitor setup would cost, you may as well buy a good quality projector.
Living With a Nerd
Realistically how many different displays can the average consumer use at a time? Gamers might want 3 or 4 and then they are landscaping them so that they can see left, center, and right. Given that and the cost (both monetary and performance) of adding more displays to a card, means that I think 2 is about right. For specialized applications like store displays, etc, more displays is better but it is not a high volume market.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
The summary is poorly worded. ATI's Powercolor HD5970 video card supports 12 display outputs. If you have two, you go up to 24 display outputs. At that point, you could monitor the whole of the matrix.
From 12 to 2 is an increase of -10.
The single video card has twelve outputs. On a Crossfire capable motherboard, you could possibly install two of these (pending room on your motherboard and inside your case). This would bring your grand total output to 24 monitors. RTFA next time before attempting math.
My work here is dung.
This is a cool card, but how many of us would ever buy one? Even if the cost of this unit is equivalent to another high end video card, putting a dozen or so on my desk is more cash that I budget in a year for toys.
Admittedly, I find the idea of having many monitors attractive. I use a dual monitor setup at work, and I find it restrictive to go back to one monitor on my home laptop. What I'd like to have is a 2(h) x 3(w) array of monitors... someday.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
Hasn't Matrox been producing multi-output cards for years? How is this any different? http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/
So, presumably, if you installed two of those cards, you could hook up twenty-four monitors.
The title is correct while the summary is false.
I haven't really checked modern chipsets, but some older nvidia models definitely had a performance drop.
My preferred setup is one larger horizontal display for environments which require directx/opengl. That is paired with a second vertical display which usually has non-interactive statistic and monitoring applications running.
There was a significant drop in performance regarding the accelerated output and unless there is a specific chip driving each display I suspect this will always be true. However, given the advancement of video controllers today it will likely be less of an impact as performance increases. Specifically, I don't recall noticing an impact on my now defunct GT 290. However, being defunct and sitting on my coffee table I can no longer confirm.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
a Beowulf cluster of those?
But seriously wouldn't it be possible to hack a displayport as high-speed interconnect and use this for computation?
IMHO - you will never come close to having a paperless office until the screen real estate comes at least close to (or over) the desk real estate.
I write articles and code - and find that having the reference stuff up at the same time on another screen, with graphics on another, makes writing a LOT faster!!!
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
In this respect the Powercolor innovation is great, as everyone can have a true immersive 3D cave even at home
How is this a selling point? Can you get anymore true 3D cave immersion than my mom's basement?
Realistically how many different displays can the average consumer use at a time?
Consumer, singular, or consumers, plural? If mainstream operating systems didn't have a problem recognizing multiple keyboards and mice and separating their input, then one could share a desktop computer among multiple users that way. Then a personal computer could become a family computer,* and school computer labs could get away with using less hardware.
* Even if you aren't running an NES emulator.
Apparently it's so overwhelming in its power and beauty my current graphics card can't bear to render it! It just gets halfway through, and then after the third set of HDMI ports comes into view it chokes up and halts, too depressed and intimidated to go further.
Seriously, though, either my connection sucks or the pictures are all slashdotted.
Finally, a tool that will allow me to watch all my porn subscriptions simultaneously...
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
I've been doing two at work for years now -- up to three because sometimes I need to work on a mac, and look at code for an iPhone port when working with another platform.
I've hit 4 a few times, as I may bring in my home PC for Linux use, but currently only three at once ever get any significant attention. Still, the notion of 3-6 monitor gaming has always appealed to me. If they can thin the borders of monitors for cheap, I'd seriously consider a 6 setup...
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Indeed. The summary and title were so at odds... I had to RTFA!
...I'll be in the corner of shame.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
As a person more or less forced to use two at work, I hate it with a vengeance because it's all one big virtual desktop because of citrix and every application feels like popping up dialogs across the middle. Three would be infinitely much better than two, at least there no "#%5%%%#"# bar dead center. I know you can do that with a regular Radeon 5xxx if you have DP displays or an active converter, but I'd love to see it become standard like double DVI ports have been for a while.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I just had a great idea, you guys. "Virtual Monitors".
Ok, ok, hear me out.
Through software your computer will generate virtual monitors which can be used to contain an application in a little box on your screen. You can then have several applications open at the same time on the same screen simply by arranging those boxes so that you can see them all. This is especially easy since monitors are larger than ever now.
I am going to be seriously rich. Maybe I will buy some new windows.
Not really arbitrary: Historically, with analog outputs, you needed one RAMDAC, plus associated passives and connector, per video output. For cost reasons, one or two RAMDACs got folded pretty quickly into common display controller chipsets, just to save on the number of packages on the card. This area was where the massive economies of scale lived. If you didn't mind paying more, people like Matrox have always been willing to sell you cards with more heads.
With the newer digital interconnects, you need a TMDS out, plus associated passives and connector, per video output. Again, deviating from the mass-market-friendly 1 or 2 outs configuration has always been possible; but pricey.
The only really novel aspect of this ATI "Eyefinity" stuff is that ATI decided to crank up the number of outputs supported, by default, right in their silicon, so sharply and thus brought lots and lots of heads into the realm of "commodity gamer cards" rather than "underperforming, yet strikingly expensive, niche cards".
http://www.playkon.com/news-2601-How-To-Solo-Sunwell-With-36-WoW-Accounts.html
so that will be three cards please
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have dual 24" monitors on my desk. Add in the laptop, a lamp, and the pictures of my cat and I could maybe fit one more monitor without having to buy another desk. 3 more desks would run me around $10000. $1000 for the desks, and $9000 for the addition that I would have to build onto my house to support my desk fantasy.
Grammar Lesson: you're is a contraction of "you are"; your means you possess something; yore means days gone by.
Though 12 seems a bit ridiculous (and awesome), I've always wanted to put four together with a little more convenience.
I used to run two screens on my home Linux desktop box (via xinerama), but those were CRT devices. In an attempt to cut down on power usage, I have now replaced them with a single, large LCD display. I still have the multiple nVidia cards linked together in the computer housing, but I believe that's probably drawing far more power than is actually useful.
I used to do a lot of graphics-intensive molecular modelling and rendering, but now that I've digressed into other fields, I can afford to be a little less "cool".
thanks but no thanks!
Meh, one of my LCDs takes 1/3rd the power of my old 21" CRT. The card itself is large because of the ports, it will probably not use much more power than it's 2/3 output sibling.
Back in the day, political spin doctors and crisis managers kept three televisions going at all types to see how the networks were treating their candidate, cause, product, or company. Now that media is interactive and diffuse, 24 monitors doesn't seem like too many for a single spokesperson to use on a revolving office year to quite literally spin real-time news and comment.
What O/S are you using? If it's Windows, are you using the ATI drivers? Native multiple-display configuration in Windows will never put a pop-up across the centre of your screens. I've been running multiple displays for years, and I've yet to see one.
Oops. For some of us, even a single monitor is too many.
Would this card drive one dozen monitors set up as digital picture frames?
I have a linux based file server in the basement that does not really do anything with its video output.
If I could hook up 12 picture frame monitors in various rooms of my house, that would be fun.
I don't want the extreme headache of manually updating 12 SDHC or CF cards. I don't want 12 individual stupid yearly subscriptions to some internet ripoff company that'll probably go out of business and make my investment obsolete the week after I buy them.
I just want to drop .jpgs into certain folders on my pre-existing file server and have the pictures randomly displayed thru the house, shuffling perhaps every 10 minutes. Also I'll have certain webcams periodically downloaded and added to the mix. And a cron job to display certain pictures at certain times, etc. A couple lines of perl, bash, and wget, thats what I'm talking about.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Not to start a UID fight, but you must be new here. ;-)
But its a whole lot cheaper to buy cheap-as-free hardware
I'm not familiar with "cheap-as-free", or how the first result from Google relates to computer hardware. Are you talking about buying broken PCs and seeing what you can salvage? That's not cheap as free; that's labor-intensive.
If this card fails you are out ~$600 with no salvageable parts (even on a totally broken motherboard you can usually salvage a HDD, any PCI cards and optical drives) and multiple workstations down.
That's why you buy either the extended replacement plan (for home use) or a spare card (for school or Internet cafe use), and you put in a 2-monitor video card to regain the use of two workstations until your replacement comes in the mail.
Really, thin clients are the way to go
What brand of thin client do you recommend? I tried an NComputing thin client box; Flash video was a smurfing slideshow. I imagine that anything using OpenGL or DirectX graphics would go slideshow as well. But the card in the article is a Radeon.
You can install 3 of these cards, for 36 displays, if you use one of the more extreme motherboards (that are loaded with PCIe x16 slots). Heck, those motherboards support 4-way CrossFire (or SLI), so if they can get the cards down in size, 48 displays from one motherboard would be trivial to implement. Tasty.
Realistically how many different displays can the average consumer use at a time?
Not the average consumer, but at Fort Knox, the Armor School has a huge building full of tank simulators that are laid out (on the inside) pretty closely to the real thing. Each little periscope gets its own little display, and you have screens all around the turret, so you could definitely use a card that had a dozen outputs.
I'm not at all sure what the volume of the market is. The military is pretty big by itself, and when you add in law enforcement training, you've gotten pretty huge. The key to working with vehicles is rehearsal, and simulators make that pretty cheap.
reminds me of the onion
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?item=N82E16824255011
each is 1920x1200
i put one in landscape mode, then i bought an articulating monitor arm, and i put the other one in portrait mode. the setup looks schizophrenic, but listen up folks:
browsing the internet on a 16:9 monitor in portrait mode is a dream
try it some day. you capture so much of a webpage you are usually peering at through a slit you are constantly scrolling through with lots of unused screen real estate on either side
as a web developer, it helps too, believe me: the landscape mode screen for code/ packet inspection/ debugging/ email, etc... the other screen for a really good 10,000 foot overview of what you are actually putting up in the browser in terms of page layout
trust me folks: get a 16:9 monitor and put it in portrait mode if you browse a lot on the internet. it is about as good as it gets in terms of ui experience
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why? Because Slashdot, while often somewhat current (within days) is NOT a late breaking news site. It is a place where news from around the tech world is brought into the discussion forum of this site's readership. The value is NOT as an RSS aggregator, but in the bringing together of geographically dispersed IT minded people who can read a story (or at least the summary or title) and discuss it. While the release of this particular video card may not have happened yesterday, the /. discussion of it is just a valid today as it was 30 days ago.
I'm an Electrical Engineer. I do a fair bit of spec writing and drafting.
I have 2 monitors right now, and I could easily have two more and replace one of mine with a much bigger monitor. (The seams really mess up the visuals when working with large drafts.)
I would anticipate that most people who use their computers for the same kind of work would want:
1. One big monitor. The bigger the better. 36" would be about right.
2. One communications monitor.
3. One datasheet monitor.
4. Once spec monitor.
The last three could be normal sized, e.g. 22".
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Hahaha...
Ask me how I know you don't use citrix...
Cheap storage VM.
I have a few beefs (beeves?) about this product:
1. Displayport is a pain in the ass, with its use of active vs passive adapters, both of which are still hard to find and confusing to the average consumer. Few displays ship with Displayport, and of those few, hardly any ship with a suitable cable, instead relying on HDMI or DVI. The cable isn't cheap.
2. Why did they spread to a 3rd slot ? Couldn't they have placed all 12 connectors in a single row, rotated 90 degrees ? Or at least split them off to a breakout cable. Motherboards are designed for double-wide cards, as they usually gap the two PCI-E 16x slots with a relatively puny 4x slot. A 3-slot card means no SLI/Crossfire in all but the most ridiculous boards e.g. Asus P6T6.
3. Everyone talks about LCD bezels getting thinner, but the average monitor is still a big clunky mess. Considering the exorbitant costs involved, and the fact that you still have bezels at least 1/2", I think the typical spendy gamer would be better served by a large LCD or Plasma TV. Sure, you will get better resolution out of 6 displays, but is 5760x2160 really worth the extra $3000 it will cost to pull off ?
4. Generally, the people who actually need (not just want) display matrices are those who couldn't care less about gaming performance. This is where Matrox comes in, because their GPUs suck but they are firmly entrenched in the pro multi-display market. Their M9188 card supports 8 displays on a single-slot card. Sure, it costs something like $2000, but if you're in the type of work that requires 8 displays (or 16), money is no object.
5. At some point, you need to consider the ratio of CPU/GPU to displays. At one point I had 7 displays, but they were fed via 3 PCs, linked together using Synergy. As a coder, it's really no big issue to have my IDE on one machine, my browser on a second, and a test environment (read: pr0n) on another. It's not like I'm going to maximize one window across 7 screens (not even pr0n).
So yeah, I think this product is a dead-end promo gimmick, as is most of the stuff at Computex. Just a bunch of tech firms showing off for bragging rights.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
My preference is 3 monitors:
With that setup, I don't have to flip between desktops to work & doing reference checks is as simple as looking between the monitors. No flipping back & forth between the project reference & the test results you just compare the 2 windows & be done with it.
That said, I can't even think of what I would do with 12 monitors other than running a kiosk with each K/V/M setup dedicated to it's own OS image.
I don't think you're correct (but I'm not going to say it very firmly because I don't know that you're not. ;-) ...
The article appears to say
I think the HD5970 supports six, and the HD5970 is a non-existent device postulated by the author -- one assumes that would be consistent with the model numbering.
The 12-monitor version may not exist yet. Six monitors ought to be enough for anybody. ;-)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
However, since the picture shows an HD5970 that has 12-ports, I'm obviously wrong. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
2 girls one cup? 1 girl, 12 cups? 12 monitors, 2 girls, a USB hub and a can of whipped cream?
I need to stop smoking so much pot.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
When I look out my office window (I know "OMG HE HAS WINDOW!") I see into the office of some stock traders and they each have 8 monitors (2 rows of 4).
Guys like them are probably the target audience. Also places like Network Operation Centers usually have a lot of screens displaying various maps, graphs, charts, etc
xplane on 24 monitors on ubuntu out of one box, but I think this was using 4 of the 6 output eyefinity cards:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6Vf8R_gOec
Assuming that the 6 output cards use 2 card slot spaces each, then you'd have 8 used. It looks like this HD5970 uses 3 slots so you could still only get two of these cards into that same system. If you could get one more rear slot to be available you might be able to fit 3 of these cards into one machine and you'd get a 36 monitor output (each monitor at 1920x1200). You could have a 9 (*1920) wide by 4 monitors high (* 1200), which is about 79.1 megapixels . Or you could do a 6 x 6 .
Get your boss to get some licenses to this:
http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/
I was an internet at some random software company for 6 months, and it helps when maximizing windows, stupid pop-up boxes appearing everywhere and just helps with sorting windows, even on uneven monitors. I run it myself on a 1680x1050 monitor next to a 1280x1024 monitor, and it really helps with stupid dialog boxes.
but mine is vertical and erect while yours is horizontal and flaccid
so my equipment is superior, at least that's what your mom and your girlfriend always tell me
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Actually...12 ports is the perfect number for a stereoscoptic cube. A single card that can do that has never been seen until today. We might finally be getting to the GPU power levels needed for a mostly realistic, true 3D environment, and all of that out of just a single machine instead of the many machines needed now. That my friends is progress!
I'm also an EE, i use 6 x 22" screens in a 3w x 2h setup using a single nvidia card and a pair of matrox triplehead2go units.
I've been using this setup for over a year or so and couldn't imagine doing design work efficiently on anything smaller.
My usual setup is something like:
1 screen with schematic
1 screen with board layout (or firmware IDE)
1 screen with e-mail/IM/etc
1 screen with browser
2 screens with datasheets or extra browsers or terminals
Some times i also need to work with multiple VM's / remote desktop connections and having a full screen for each one is great.
I would like to eventually change to 1 large center screen and rotate the 2 22" screens on the sides of it to a portrait orientation for better datasheet reading but thats not really possible right now under linux with the nvidia + triplehead2go approach
I'm hoping nvidia will put out a similar type of card as the ati linux drivers are pretty meh.
I've messed around with viewing things on all 6 monitors at once, movies/games. Never really liked it. I just need all the space.
Getting more monitors has been the biggest increase in my productivity since i left college, i can see the same being true for anyone doing design work on a computer (CAD, graphics editing, video editing, etc).
Or one row of five large 4:3 displays and a second row of six smaller 4:3 displays and one 2:1 display, and you'd have the perfect setup to monitor the world's nuclear arsenal while also cracking 10-character launch codes and playing tic-tac-toe.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
well, sgi's old dg5-8 could do 8 monitors, but you could have 16 per machine.
price...er...yeah...ok...
Max.
I really liked /. once in a time. But why I don't as much any more is not just that this news is old (most are not on /.) /. and it feels like the poster haven't even read the article.
/. and feel that it was interesting for me as a nerd. Now days it is few per week that are really interesting. /. can safety me, or /. has become less news for nerds. /. has to go the way of all social media, it start with a selected few and when it become too popular that selected few has to start all over (like Myspace, Facebook and all other).
/. times to write in.
It's that this news is old with a very bad summery that is more what I expect from Facebook than
And the really horrible is that once I could read any news on
Either I have become as much a nerd that not even
But I guess
I do like to hear from people that have in depth knowledge about the articles, but I get the feeling many/most have already left (or are just drowning in all comments).
Sorry for being off topic, but I have been waiting a long time for that article about the old
Twelve video cards with twelve ports? That's just gross.
That's the second biggest video card I've ever seen.
(and no, I'm not kidding)
--
Toro
With this you could set up an entire store, or museum, or trade-show display on one system (with SSD and full RAM, of course). Years ago I helped configure and pack ten computers for a trade show booth; this would make life much easier, and save on shipping and setup complexity.
;-) because, you know what, for some problems a centralized server is the best solution.
We keep re-inventing the mainframe
They're making progress. Sharp is coming out with a 60" LCD with bezel widths of 2.4 mm and 4.1 mm (with video). Still room for improvement.
And oh, I'll take three :-\
Belief is the currency of delusion.
"Whoa! It's like I'm actually inside..."
Everyone's thinking about desktops; maybe that's not the target market.
Think info displays in railway stations etc.
Think multimedia displays in bars and clubs.
Think art installations.
Think information status displays for monitoring.
Think information radiators for agile dev teams.
There's all kinds of situations where it is very useful to drive lots and lots of monitors from one machine.
If you, like me, are planning on taking over the world, and converting the entire population into mindless zombie slaves, the more monitors you have the better. Controlling all those zombies takes a lot of real estate.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
The fourth (and possibly fifth) monitors can be remoted into your dev server(s) so that you can watch and tweak them (web server, db server, etc.). They aren't as critical, so they can be smaller or placed in a different row, depending on your preferences. Still not 12, though.
I could see this being useful in a NOC setup. the NOC for my job has 12 PC's that run 25 monitors. I helped them out with buy setting upSynergy to cut down on the number of keyboards and mice, but with two of these cards, we could could cut that down to one or two PC's. It would make life for the NOC admin's much easier, not to mention the cost savings on running 10 less PC's.
"Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security" --Benjamin Franklin
a Beowulf cluster of THOSE jobbies....
what ncomputing client did you use?
It was an L230. At that price, we could have gone with an ION nettop PC, and that's what we did after that debacle.
Consumer, singular, or consumers, plural? If mainstream operating systems didn't have a problem recognizing multiple keyboards and mice and separating their input, then one could share a desktop computer among multiple users that way. Then a personal computer could become a family computer,* and school computer labs could get away with using less hardware.
Are you suggesting Linux is not a mainstream operating system? It's had support for this since 2001. Schools in Brazil do exactly that. I run such a configuration at home. One keyboard/mouse on my couch, video plugged into my TV, and a keyboard/video/mouse in the bedroom. I can play eve online while my hypothetical girlfriend watches charmed on mythtv.
If you are suggesting that linux is not mainstream, why not just say Windows instead of "mainstream operating systems"?
I was an internet at some random software company for 6 months...
How did you get that job?!
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
If you are suggesting that linux is not mainstream, why not just say Windows instead of "mainstream operating systems"?
Because I was trying to cover both Windows and Mac OS X, not just Windows.
With their driver issues, they could have the super best card in the land and it won't make any difference since the drivers suck so badly you have to upgrade them constantly until you get a (hopefully) semi-stable release (it only boots once in a while now).
[John]
Shit better not happen!
In citrix-based companies, not that many as you start citrix and it runs a full screen session with your desktop. Everything you need to use is in citrix so there's no point in having citrix on one screen and something else on the other, that has at least been the way in the three companies I've seen though I admit only one has used this dual-screen setup. And that citrix desktop has no clue it's actually split over two monitors, leading to the results I talked about.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I have a 23" 1920x1080 set on a $50 pivot mount, and I can indeed verify that message boards, articles, and other text-heavy pages look great in a vertical orientation.
you capture so much of a webpage you are usually peering at through a slit you are constantly scrolling through with lots of unused screen real estate on either side
Your eyes are aligned horizontally. Your vertical FOV angle is limited. With your 9:16 setup you have to actually move your eyes up and down. With a 16:9 setup you can keep looking at the same "slit" (hurr hurr) while you scroll the content past it.
Seems to me the only advantage your setup has is that you can get a better overview of a long page. But you couldn't read any of it because, to take it all in, you'd have to move too far away to read any.
Well, he wasn't a truck driver. Maybe a plumber?
Rotating your firmware monitor is the best thing you can do for yourself. The only problem is that the manufacturers assume that you'd never do that so the display is sub-par, but it's perfectly suitable for an IDE.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
As a budding evil genius I can definitely see a use for this. Screens to monitor my growing army of robotic servants. Screens to monitor my outside and inside security. A good view from the robotic fly I sent to investigate my enemies business. Beside the fact that this has a really high evil genius coolness factor of being the center of an electronic universe just like I am the center of the real universe. Borderline Narcissist. I'll show you just how borderline my Narcissism is my dear therapist.
If only KDE4 would support 3 (or more) monitors in a accelerated setup. I also use 3 monitors, but am stuck with KDE3 until the issues with KDE4 and multi-head are sorted out.
Be sure to factor in the thrust generated by the extremely powerful cooling fan - you wouldn't want your box taking off...
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. - Philip K. Dick
There's lots of arguments for using multiple monitors, for the past 4 years I've had upto 7monitors at one point and have scaled back to 5. It really is all about screen real estate. As a developer, the more monitors I have, the easier it becomes to be productive at multitasking.
Working as an e-commerce developer, this is how I typically manage the monitors.
One monitor dedicated to email.
One monitor shared between Tailing log files and file manager, I find it's easiest to share if both windows have maximized height, but 90% width, and one aligned to the left of the screen the other to the right, so I can easily "select" between the two, at the same time not requiring any additional actions to bring one window forwards.
One monitor dedicated for a browser, usually front and center
One monitor dedicated for the code editor of choice
Finally one monitor to collect misc items, which may include IM client, emails I am composing, music player, perhaps even another browser for compatibility or for coding reference. This monitor is usually on the far end of the setup of monitors.
Here's a shot of my current setup: http://twitpic.com/1uv28l
The stacked monitor is on a different machine than the other 5.
~CYD
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
You ran explicitly unsupported software then.
I understand, but the problem is that too much software that people expect to be supported is unsupported, or at least it was back when L230 was top of the line.
I said elsewhere we use x550s, that's where you save money.
If you can keep all workstations within 30 feet of a full-size desktop PC with a PCI slot. (Do new computers still have PCI slots, or is it all PCIe now?) Now I realize that in a school computer lab or Internet cafe, the range limitation is not a problem. But it was a problem where I tried them, which is why we used the L series and perhaps why I forgot about the X series. Besides, you will still need a Windows TS or RDS CAL for each workstation that runs even one app that is not ported to Linux, and at $150 each, the licenses alone almost as expensive as a nettop.
Many applications need numerous displays off of a single computer where remote X usage will not suffice. Think control rooms, large installations, classrooms, etc.
And it's related to DisplayPort, because DP doesn't need a clock signal generator. If you want to use 3+ screens, anything past the first two must be DP or use an active DP converter. Too bad so many low-end monitors ship with it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
To hell with the stupid looking card, where the hell are the pix of the "pretty lady Tia" mentioned in the article? I call shenanigans...
That is all.
look at the dimensions. that's not random
there's visual utility in a tall vertical monitor. maybe it somehow flows with how the mind organizes visua information, but there's something definitely to it
so don't talk in hypotheticals, just try a 16:9 in portrait mode, you'll see, it just feels better
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
>I write articles and code - and find that having the reference stuff up at the same time on another screen, with graphics on another, makes writing a LOT faster!!!
Good. Here's another tip: use Xwindows virtual desktops. I used to use two 18" x a grid of nine = EIGHTEEN displays.
That was ten years ago. Flipping between the virtual desktops? Instantaneous with a keyboard shortcut. (The reason I got up to 3x3 is because there was no performance loss. I probably could have done 4x4 or 5x5. This was the 8mb card era too. Linux is just fast as fuck.)
Caveat, you need the right display manager. Crucial features:
* The ability to make a 2D grid of your choice. 2x2, 2x3, 3x3, etc. NOT just a "stack." Your shit will get lost in a stack of anything.
* Small picture-in-picture window showing what apps are open on your virtuals.
* Programmable keyboard shortcuts. If you have to switch displays with a mouse, you might as well forget it and stick to minimizing.
Now you've made me curious if Windows has caught up....Something tells me it's still clunky...
>That said, I can't even think of what I would do with 12 monitors
I've done it (virtually). You fill them with crap. Open a browser window with your favorite news site (slashdot?) Leave it open...forever.
I have papers on my desk I haven't read in weeks. Is this any different?
>every application feels like popping up dialogs across the middle.
I suspect the problem is that somewhere in here, you are using Windows. I'm betting Citrix runs Windows remotely on a Windows terminal? Blah.
The only "work" I would do on Windows is maybe Word/Excel/Photoshop. And if I'm using Excel, then obviously I'm not working very hard.
I'm just wondering where you put them all. I can't imagine a room big enough (in a house) to fit 12 monitors. I wouldn't get small ones, either. Although you might be forced to.
A suitable wall-covering for my man-cave. If only I could afford the inevitable divorce that would stem from spending thousands of dollars on the stuff.
Rob Enderle's excellent new book: Everything I needed to know about Computer Science I learned in Marketing School
Did someone call for a UID fight?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I have a 12 24in monitor setup at work when I'm on shift. The guy next to me has 6 24in + 4 40 inch monitors. Its very nice :) Although the heat they kick out is insane. We do actually need it as well so this card is of interest to us
:P
To prove it, heres a web cam, my station is the big one at the end. That said I imagine we are a fairly unique case, I dont think many people need to monitor and control the triggering and data acquisition of a large particle physics experiment. But just pointing out there is a use case for the card
The post I responded to never mentioned how they are using citrix. There are many ways.
From GGP:
...it's all one big virtual desktop because of citrix
i have been posting on slashdot for years, a couple times a week at least, hundreds, maybe thousands of comments, and never once have i posted anonymously
i simply don't see the need. i'm not ashamed of anything i say
maybe in retrospect i've said something embarrassing, but at the time of posting, it's my personality to just blurt it out. i've never really been embarrassed about anything i want to say. maybe i lack shame. but there's very little to be ashamed about here, so what's the big deal?
what i am saying is: i don't even understand why anyone would ever want post anything anonymously. its an alien concept to my personality
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I can't begin to tell all the things that having this much virtual and real video desktop means to my productivity.
Been there, done that, paid for the T-shirt
and didn't get it
Interesting for security solutions..
"Daria todo lo que se, por la mitad de lo que ignoro" http://blog.oaxrom.com
And I don't understand why you cannot buy one big monitor instead of several small ones. The screen area is the same, which is main cost factor, so why are decent sized displays (1920x1200 and up) still so expensive?